Sermons

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Recently, somebody about half my age expressed the opinion that her favorite example of biblical wisdom literature was the Book of Ecclesiastes. I think my initial response might have not been as careful as it should have been. I think I said something like “when I was your age I hated Ecclesiastes. It was my least favorite book of the bible.” I went on to explain what I meant, but I should have opened with this: “You are clearly more mature than I was at your age. As a young person I found Ecclesiastes gloomy and fatalistic, but now I finally get it. Good on you for figuring this out a lot sooner than I did.”

In case you’re not familiar with the book, you can be forgiven: because of the cycle of assigned reading (the lectionary) we are bound to follow we only hear it read in Church on a Sunday once every three years, and then invariably in late July or early August–not a peak time for church attendance. And if you’re only familiar with the eight verses adapted by Pete Seeger and popularized by the rock band The Byrds as the single “Turn! Turn! Turn!” you might get the impression that the book tap into the hippy zeitgeist, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

As an aside, this issue of biblical literacy is an important one to me, so I don’t want the fact that I get animated talking about it sometimes to come across as shaming anybody for not knowing a whole lot of the bible. That said, while our tradition of following the lectionary no doubt exposes all of us to a broader diet of scripture than is likely to be found in most non-liturgical churches, what we hear on Sunday mornings is not exhaustive. So, if you are looking for a Lenten discipline, I heartily recommend some that you consider adopting some pattern of daily bible reading. There are lots of schemes available on the market and online for reading the whole bible in a year, for example, but I think the best place to start is with the daily office lectionary in the back of your prayerbooks, which, though it doesn’t cover every single verse does give an excellent, manageable exposure to most of the bible. Then, if you want, you can even do what I’ve started to do–namely, taking note of when that lectionary skips several verses or even chapters, think to yourself “huh, why’d they cut that?”, and then go read it after you morning or evening prayer. That will familiarize you with some of the nastier bits of scripture that “they” (meaning the people who put the lectionary together) don’t think you’re man or woman enough to handle.

Anyway, back to Ecclesiastes. Like I said, I used to hate it because if you’re not familiar with it, the overarching message seems so gloomy and fatalistic. Vanity upon vanity, all is vanity! The word vanity there is actually the Hebrew הבל, meaning vapor, smoke, nothingness that the slightest breeze can sweep away. The best you can do, the preacher says, is live a simple life, enjoy your work, and try to die with a clean conscience, because one way or another, you will eventually die.

Being a part of the generation that was told over and over again growing up that we could change the world and that we could be or do anything so long as we tried hard enough, this is precisely the opposite of what we were trained to believe. It was a well-intentioned lie, but a lie nonetheless, perhaps an over-correction from an era in which children were to be seen and not heard combined with the optimism and social and economic progress of the historical “blip” which was post-war America. The suggestion that we are not all masters of our own destiny lies in stark relief against the cultural consensus under which I was raised.

I have become convinced that all the assumptions to which the message of Ecclesiastes provides a rejoinder serve as a spiritual straitjacket whose straps are the demands of moral perfectionism and whose sewn sleeves serve to limit the boasts of radical self-reliance. The only shears which can snip us out of this canvas-charactered constraint, this constitutional captivity, are the spirits of Ecclesiastes and of Ash Wednesday, which remind us of two facts we’d like to ignore: we are sinners and we are going to die.

All I’ve said about generational concerns notwithstanding, I think this point is in fact universally applicable, it may just strike those who grew up under a moral-therapeutic model of human identity and value as more acute, because that model makes the basic emptiness of such an approach more obvious after we’ve tried it for a while and failed. In simpler terms, we all need to be freed from the impossible expectations of moral perfectionism and total self-sufficiency. We all need to be reminded, like I said, that we are sinners and we are going to die.

This naturally lets a lot of the pressure off, but it’s about more than that. This is just the first step to the solution of getting us out of that straitjacket. After the realization of our sinfulness and mortality, we are able to see a way out of the dilemma. When we see we simply cannot measure up by virtue of our own will and efforts, we are able to call on the one who is our helper. When we say that we are sinners, that that is central to our being, not just the accumulation of personal mistakes, but rather a flaw in our nature which we cannot fix on our own by just being good, then we can finally do the one needful thing–namely, call upon the one who doesn’t just teach us how to be better, but whose own righteousness makes us better despite ourselves and our perennial inability to learn or remember that moral lesson. When we are told we are going to die, that we are mortal, we are given the opportunity to rely on the one whose very nature transcends our fundamental finitude, our cardinal contingency.

So, that is what we are about this day. I’ve been asked by a few, sometimes in a slightly accusatory tone by a couple of my favorite former interlocutors (both of whom were brought up in Methodism, so came by their high view of human effort honestly) why we have to keep doing this. Is there not a point at which we can stop talking about sin? My answer is that I cannot speak for anybody else having not reached perfection myself, and personally not believing it possible this side of paradise. I just know that I need this reminder daily, sometimes hourly, and especially on days like today, as we enter a season of more intense and intentional reliance on the one who saves us. I need it, because I so easily forget and fall back into the sort of pride that has me convince myself that I can do it on my own. To use the language of the Apostle Paul, I need the Law continually to convict me so that I can accept the Grace God offers through his Son.

This affirmation–“I am a sinner and I’m going to die”–then, is not gloomy, but liberating, because just the other side of that affirmation is the realization (whether for the first time or the millionth) that we are redeemed and we are promised new life. It’s not our doing; it’s the Grace of God working in us that which is well-pleasing in his own sight, more than we can possibly ask or imagine. Today we ask him to do it all for us yet again, and he whose property is always to have mercy stands ready, as ever, to accomplish all that he has purposed.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

It won’t surprise many of you that my idea of a “beach read” is not shared by those whose relaxation is enhanced by light romances or heart-pumping thrillers. There’s nothing wrong with these, naturally; it’s just that I discovered that I have a rather puritanical view of vacations. So if the holiday in question is not planned around cultural experiences–and my time away a couple of weeks ago was not, by necessity–then I tend to choose reading material which is either difficult or in some way intellectually improving. So, among my most recent vacation reads was the collected biographies of the first twelve Caesars by Suetonius. My gesture toward the “beach read” impulse was to read them in translation, though this frequently had me pulling the original Latin up on my phone to determine what the translator had rendered as anachronistic English idioms, lexigraphic “rabbit holes” being one of my chief pastimes.

Anyway, one of the things that kept coming up, and which might strike some as less interesting than the frequent, flagrant depravities of these emperors, was how often manipulation of the grain dole was used to curry favor with the rowdy Roman populace. You may have heard the phrase “panem et circenses” before; it comes from a contemporary of Suetonius, the satirist Juvenal, who wrote “Everything now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.” In other words, to keep the crowds in line, give them grain and put on spectacles, particularly gladiatorial contests and chariot races.

Indeed, the grain dole which began as an emergency measure during the Republic but morphed very quickly during the First Century A.D. into a permanent entitlement system, became even more important, I would argue, after the influence of Christianity ended violent spectacles. You can’t let the people enjoy watching other people get brutally murdered in the arena anymore, so you better give them even more grain to keep them from rioting! I’d also argue that this is why the Empire was so determined to integrate North Africa and the Levant into the imperial system and why there were constant attempts to keep Persia as a client state–these regions being far more productive than anywhere in Western Europe at the time, and why the eventual fall of the Western Empire was preceded by Vandals taking control of so many of those regions. Bread is life, and bread was also control until very recently in Western societies.

Some of you know I’ve been on a low-carb diet for a while now. I only mention it to say that this would have been an absurd and impossible project for human beings for nearly the entirety of human history (and, indeed, human prehistory). Even today, this reality obtains in much of the world for the vast majority of people, who would see a diet full of proteins and vegetables and fruit as a benefit of great wealth. Their primary source of calories remains wheat or rice or corn. I saw a horror-comedy movie not too long ago (which I liked a lot, but would only recommend to those of a stout constitution) called The Menu in which an obsessive chef, played by Ralph Fiennes, gives a lavish but deadly meal to a group of obscenely wealthy diners. The funniest moment to me, was when this chef presents his patrons a “non-bread bread course,”–just tiny cups of stuff one might spread on bread if he had any. Bread, he basically says, is what ordinary people eat to stay alive, you are not ordinary people, and so you will get no bread.

Conservatively speaking, bread probably became the primary source of our caloric intake in about 10,000 B.C. More than a thousand years before Christ and the Caesars, Joseph’s brothers arrive in Egypt. We heard the climax of the story today–Joseph is reconciled with the brothers who sold him into slavery–but what brought them to that point? They needed bread. Egypt had full granaries, and they did because Joseph proved himself an able and prophetic manager of that Kingdom’s system of storing and distributing grain. The need for that most simple thing which sustains life was transformed into the means of providing mercy and loving-kindness. Bread in this story is Grace.

What I really want us to consider (here Fr. John finally gets to the point!) is the final verse from this morning’s Gospel: “Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into you lap. For the measure you give will be the measure you get back.” The image here is of one in a marketplace or perhaps at the local, imperial granary, the θησαυροζ, (literally, treasure house, and the word from which we get the English thesaurus). Unlike in the city of Rome, this would not have been an impressive structure with a courtyard and people milling about. In the Middle East it would have been a ταβὲρνα, a little shop basically, and there would have been a line stretching out into the city in the heat of the day. Now, Roman officials were famous for efficiency and officiousness. No doubt some state agent would verify that you were an adult, male Roman citizen as soon as you finally got inside to see if you were on the dole or if you’d have to pay for the grain at an extortionate price. Then some other official would quickly measure out your allotment and send you on your way. What they almost certainly wouldn’t have done was take your sack, fill it, shake it and push it down, add more, and repeat the process. They certainly wouldn’t fill your grain sack until it overflowed and let you keep whatever excess fell into your lap. The profligate generosity of this image would have struck those listening to Jesus’ sermon as wildly improbable, yet Jesus assures them that God’s Grace and the Grace we are to extend to others as his disciples works just like this.

Now the form which this call for us to serve as we have been served takes many forms. Charity in terms of alms and other practical means of offering support to the poor is absolutely one of them. I love what St. Augustine said in one of his sermons: “Come now, let’s see if you can cheer the poor up today. You be their granaries.” Elsewhere, in reference to the foolish landowner who kept expanding his farm before dying, he wrote that “the bellies of the poor are safer storehouses than barns.”

It is more than this sort of charity of which Jesus speaks today, though that is certainly part of. Our fallen, human obsession with what’s fair over what’s merciful, will balk at much of what Jesus says here. Love your enemies by doing good things for them, whatever they might have done to you. If somebody steals from you, don’t just let them go, give them some more. Don’t just avoid usury, don’t just avoid charging reasonable interest, but don’t expect a debtor even to pay you back. Most of all, and most difficult of all, don’t judge anybody, and not even in the “who am I to judge” way in which we rightly avoid condemning people whose offenses have nothing to do with us. Don’t judge anybody, even if they’ve harmed you.

Now these must be some of the hardest of Jesus’ teachings, full stop. I’m not smart enough to figure out how this radical selflessness is to be weighed against competing, Christian moral principles like justice, particularly when there are victims of real abuses that we just have to say–that victim needs to see something done on his or her behalf pertaining to make things right. I don’t know, and that’s why I’m glad I’m a priest instead of a judge or a cop.

Even more than not being able to sort it all out from a moral-theological standpoint, I know I’m not good enough, I’m not enough of a saint to succeed in living it out. None of us is, and maybe that’s part of the point.

But what I do know is this: as Christians, as followers of Jesus, as people who have been extended unmerited, unimaginable, infinite Grace through the Blood of the Lamb shed for our salvation, the most important thing we can do is to try our level best to extend grace to others. Grace doesn’t look on deserving. It has nothing to do with the way I, sinner that I am, tend to approach life–namely by the application of the priciple “what’s fair is fair.” It is, rather, the outworking of the kind of love which bears and hopes and believes and endures all things. It is tautologically gratuitous. It’s a hard thing to do sometimes. Or maybe it’s the hardest thing to do at any time! Thank God that God’s Grace can cover even our un-graciousness borne of ingratitude. Thank God that His Holy Spirit, working in us, can sometimes accomplish through us those acts of mercy and compassion that we cannot do on our own.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In light of just having heard St. Luke’s account of the beatitudes from Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain (the Lukan parallel of the Sermon on the Mount from St. Matthew’s Gospel), I want to speak briefly this morning about a somewhat controversial theological claim articulated during the latter half of the twentieth century- namely, the preferential option for the poor.

This concept, the preferential option, was first championed by the Peruvian theologian and Roman Catholic, Dominican priest Gustavo Gutiérez in his 1968 outline “Toward a Theology of Liberation.” The claim, in its simplest form, is that when Jesus said “Blessed are the poor” he was, in some sense, summarizing the moral and socio-political dimension of the entire biblical account, that there is a special place in God’s heart for the poor and marginalized, and that one of our chief moral duties as Christians is to help model the Kingdom of God insofar as its promise is to restore “the least of these” to wholeness, both spiritually and materially.

Now, this seems uncontroversial enough, doesn’t it? Over and over, scripture demands that those of us with means are obliged to serve those without. But consider when Gutiérez’s outline was released–1968–and the year his seminal monograph, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, was published–1971–and you might realize how this would have gone over. It was the height of the Cold War, and “enemy number one” was the “growing threat” of international Communism. The intellectual movement which Gutiérez’s work sparked, and which came to be known as liberation theology was, thus, labeled Marxist.

In fairness to the critics of liberation theology writ large (and I’d actually count myself among these critics) the movement strayed into what I, for one, would consider serious theological error. Many of the proponents leaned into Marxist analysis, reckoning class struggle the animating force of history rather than the death and resurrection of Christ Jesus and the sanctifying presence of the Holy Spirit. Too often praxis preceded theoria, the experience of well meaning but sometimes misguided activism took precedence over reflection on the truths given in Scripture and the Church’s tradition, that the movement produced what we might call a “false soteriology”- that is, a mistaken view of what constitutes salvation.

What do I mean? When the establishment of a particular socio-political reality by our own efforts becomes the chief end, when we call that our salvation, then our hope is founded in something at best merely adjacent to and at worst at odds with, the true salvation which is only in Christ Jesus. The same, naturally, can be said of liberation theology’s political polar opposite, the prosperity gospel, which has become popular in North American mega churches. This view seems to place salvation in the realm of the personal accumulation of wealth. Not to put too fine a point on it, but anything that places itself rather than Christ as the source and summit of salvation is, by definition, antichrist. Now, there’s a qualitative moral difference between a system whose intended end is social equality and one whose end is the sanctification of personal greed. I don’t mean to make a false equivalency here. But neither can in itself be the Gospel, and if either claims to be, then we are in real trouble. Either soteriological perspective falls victim to “trust[ing] in man” as the Lord spoke to Jeremiah in this morning’s old testament lesson, and the result, we are told, is curse rather than salvation.

But let’s take a step back and consider two questions: first, what does scripture teach with regard to the status of the poor in the heart of God and what is our concommitant obligation? And second, how does this relate to a true soteriology?

Answering the first question is easier. James tells us God has chosen the poor to be rich in faith. Our Lady, in the Magnificat, celebrates God’s choice of the lowly to be vessels of his Grace, herself chief among them. The Psalmist continually reminds us of God’s special desire for the poor. The Law of Moses, over and over again, makes special note of Israel’s responsibility for the indigent who dwell among them. Matthew 25 identifies the moral center of the Gospel as being based on how faithful we are in loving those with less. I’ll hold back from peppering prooftexts all over you, but suffice to say, the biblical account is clear.

I think most of us acknowledge this. Christians, indeed all people of goodwill, have genuine differences of opinion on what the most effective way of aiding the poor is, and a lot of our political disagreements about things like tax structure and social programs come from people with different views about what the best approach is to lifting the poor from their poverty, but that they nonetheless desire a more equitable situation. Perhaps I’m a Pollyanna on this point, but I feel I have to hold on to that so as not to despair. Of course, there are some who simply “despise the poor in their poverty.” But, I think most of us care enough about the moral demands of the Gospel to recognize our obligation to help those in need.

So, that was the easy question, believe it or not. Now to the difficult question, the one pertaining to salvation. It is worth noting that Luke’s version of the beatitudes has several differences with Matthew’s more popular version, but the difference you might have noticed this morning is the inclusion of “woes” after the “blesseds.” The blessedness of the poor and the hungry and the mournful and the persecuted is contrasted with the coming doom of the rich and the full and the joyous and those who are praised in this world. This should remind us of earlier passages in Luke’s Gospel. It should remind us of the Magnificat, which I’ve already mentioned. It should remind us of Jesus’ first sermon in the synagogue in Nazareth, in which he proclaimed the year of Jubilee and was nearly killed for it. It may also, and this is where it gets awfully uncomfortable, remind you of Jesus’ conversation with the rich young man in Luke 18, in which the young man’s wealth made him despair of his ability to follow the Christ who said “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.”

So, here is the really difficult question, not necessarily difficult because the answer is unclear but difficult because the clear answer makes us so uncomfortable. Is it easier for a poor person to get into heaven than a rich person? Yes. The answer is yes. Now, to be fair, in Luke 18, after the rich man’s desolation, Jesus himself reminds us that “what is impossible with men is possible with God,” but possible does not mean easy.

But, why? It is not because the wealthy are inherently more sinful nor that the poor are more inherently ethical. I believe that we should neither fetishize the poor nor engage in class struggle. This, too, is idolatry. It is, rather, that the more comfortable one is, the more advantages one has, the closer such idols, such false sources of hope for salvation, lie at hand.

I say all this as a sinner in need of saving from the selfsame tendency toward idolatry. I know for a fact that I have–at least on occasion–sought to find my own salvation in money or security or my education or my professional attainments or my innate cleverness instead of in the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the only thing that can actually save me.

The one benefit, then, the most poor and distressed have in this life is an ease in recognition that the hope for salvation must be built on something greater and more eternal. God does not will penury, no more than God would will any other difficulty that has befallen our world due to sin. Nevertheless, it is in these extremities that men and women can catch a glimpse of the saving power of God in ways that our own comfort and self-reliance can obscure.

It is, then, our obligation as those with more-than-enough to get by, not only to aid the poor (and feed the hungry and welcome the stranger and visit the sick and the prisoner and do all the other things our Lord requires of us) but also to tear down the altars we have erected to false gods in our own hearts (to the gods of wealth and comfort and security and all the rest) until we can be assured that our hope is built on nothing less, nor anything more, than Jesus’ blood and righteousness. In other words, we ask God to purify our hearts to be a temple made even for himself.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.